Opinion: We Need a Different Strategy for COVID-19 Testing

Epidemiologist Kevin Winthrop, MD, MPH, is co-author on a new opinion piece in MedPage Today, arguing that public health has taken a back seat to clinical diagnosis for too long when it comes to testing for COVID-19. “From a public health perspective, trying to test everyone would be a foolish waste of resources. There is a simpler, less costly, and entirely feasible alternative. Public health practitioners use sample surveys to estimate population rates. Similar to political polls, we can test randomly selected people stratified by a few variables in order to learn how many have been infected, or are currently infected, and among them, how many have symptoms, or not.”